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Wide Angle 21.2 (1999) 101-119


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Radical Attractions:
The Uprising of '34

Jane M. Gaines

[Figure 1]   [Figure 2]  

"The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

--Milan Kundera

Those familiar with The Uprising of '34 will recognize the epigram from the conclusion of the film, the film's epilogue here my prologue. In their monumental effort to retrieve from memory the Textile Workers of America strike of 1934, a recollection of epic proportions, George Stoney and Judith Helfand have given us a narrative that pushes against the force of forgetting. Using all of the capacity of the motion picture to reiterate, repeat, and replay, they have also returned us to that privileged affiliation between the moving image and peoples' struggles. They have returned us to thinking about what it was that radicals thought motion pictures could do. Radicals, beginning in the post-revolutionary twenties not only envisioned the moving image machine as able to energize and politicize. They thought that it could move mountains. But in recent years, this vision of radical cinema has become a memory. With Uprising, however, Stoney and Helfand have made us wonder why in recent years we may have thought that the tradition of radical workers' cinema was long gone. Although films in this tradition have appeared with less and less frequency in the U.S. since the rebirth of the tradition in the seventies, nostalgia for the thirties or the sixties (the always-more-political times) persists. Uprising, however, does nothing to encourage nostalgia. [End Page 101]

The film is a use of the past to update radicalism, demonstrating that there is still massive work to be done to uncover the radical past that many Americans did not know they had. While others may have mourned the fact that in the West there would seem to be no radical present and therefore no momentous movements to follow on film, Helfand and Stoney have found in our radical past the striking images needed to politicize the present. In The Uprising of '34, this lost past comes back in the struggle retrieved and imaged, the voices of protest conjured up again, producing a wonderful and powerful organizing tool.

This is the occasion to praise The Uprising of '34 as well as to remark on the mass phenomenon of its airing on PBS stations across the country. We also need to marvel at its success, a success that has come despite the hostility on the Right that Patricia Zimmermann has described as the "war on documentary." 1 Despite early setbacks, most notably the refusal of PBS stations in North and South Carolina to air the film when it was first broadcast, we need to credit the distribution engine that continues to circulate VHS copies of the film. Significantly, the tape has been distributed to schools and libraries and screened in conjunction with union meetings and within other organizing efforts, particularly in the Southeast where textile workers still remain hard to organize. This is also the occasion for something more difficult--a reconsideration of theories of documentary aesthetics, an extremely important academic exercise that goes to the heart of how documentary film history is taught in colleges and universities in Europe and the U.S. For if The Uprising of '34 has done one thing, it has challenged the seventies dictum that radical form and radical politics have to fit hand-in-glove. I am referring to the formula by which films were once measured, assessing their politics by their antagonism to (and refusal of) the illusionistic devices of Hollywood pleasure cinema. What is needed is another approach, one that looks at politicized bodies as well as devices. What is needed is an approach that works backward from the particular films that have politically moved us to the question of the devices they use to produce their effects. What do I mean by moved? By moved I mean the mix of affect and action that the double meaning of the word implies. I mean everything from it "troubled"or "disturbed" or "shocked," to it made...

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